Family members say she was a quiet, strong-willed woman devoted to family who saw to it that several generations of kin would be wrapped in the warmth of one of her handmade quilts.

Norma Lee Prater, whose legacy will be the dozens of colorful and practical works she painstakingly pieced together all her life, died Tuesday, May 25, at Oak Riley Nursing Home after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 97.

Born in Greenbrier, she was the oldest daughter in a family of five children who grew up on a farm and attended school only through the ninth grade.

Eventually her family moved to the tiny Zion Hill community where she met George W. Prater, one year her senior, whom she married in a secret ceremony before a justice of the peace when she was 20.

"Her and daddy ran off and got married," her son Floyd said, recounting the familiar story she liked to tell about how they rode a buggy to Jacksonville to take the train to Little Rock to be wed.

"I asked her why she didn't just go straight to Little Rock, and she said she wanted to ride the train," her oldest son Lloyd said.

A few years after they had started their family of three sons and one daughter, the couple moved to Oak Grove, where they lived ever after.

Her daughter-in-law describes her as "mostly an old-home lady," who loved taking care of her family while her husband worked for the county, operating heavy equipment.

"She always made sure we had what we needed," Lloyd Prater said.

She cooked and sewed and worked in the yard, finding fulfillment in homemaking and child raising and bringing goodies to friends and neighbors.

"She loved company and she used to call me and tell me she made me a loaf of bread and asked if I was coming to get it," Floyd Prater said.

Loyd Prater, who is the Oak Grove volunteer fire chief, said she used to bake coconut cakes and take them to the station for any firemen who were working late.

And "when we were younger there was a family next to us that was in some trouble and didn't have food to feed the five or six children, so Mom would take them food," Floyd said. "She couldn't stand to see anyone go without food."

But most of all she made quilts, a skill she learned from her mother during the Great Depression, when times were lean and piecework was commonplace.

"They had to make their own quilts back then," said Floyd's wife, Ophelia, "She enjoyed making the quilts so she just kept on quilting over the years. She liked to keep her hands busy."

Her canvas was her lap frame, and she would sit for hours at a time joining scraps into original designs with the finest of stitches, working on one quilt for months at a time because she would put it aside while she did other things and then pick it up again.

"Sometime she used pieces of material that were no bigger than a thumbnail, and she sewed all those together by hand," Lloyd said. "She never used a sewing machine; and that takes a lot of labor."

Each quilt was different. Some had flower designs, others had people shapes, some were subtle in tone, others ablaze with color.

Most were her own patterns, but she sometimes used on pattern she had learned from her mother, a double-wedding ring design of interlocking circles of color.

When she was young she quilted with the Home Demonstration Club, which would often gather at a church or home and work on a quilt collectively, her sons said.

Later she would begin creating a quilt and then decide who she was making it for, often presenting one to family members when they came to town or when they got married. And before she stopped quilting about two years ago, Mrs. Prater made sure that each of her five children and 12 grandchildren had one of her masterpeices.

"She never sold one," Loyd said.

To the end she was fiercely independent and strong willed, her sons say, and deciding who should get her handiwork was just part of that.

It was much like when Lloyd, the longtime chief of the Oak Grove Volunteer Fire Department, was in a tough race for reelection a few years ago, she also demanded to be taken to a polling station so she could vote for her son.

"When she made up her mind that was it," Lloyd said. "She was set to it."

She was preceded in death by her husband, George W. Prater, one son, Treber Prater, one daughter, Claudine Bruton, and three brothers.

Besides her two sons and their wives she is survived by son Louie Prater and his wife; one sister, hathen Crider of Shreveport, La.; 12 grandchildren; 28 great-grandchildren; and three great-great-grandchildren.

Funeral services were held Friday, May 28, at the Roller-Owens Funeral Home chapel.

The family requests that memorials be made to the Somers Avenue Church of Christ in North Little Rock or to Arkansas Hospice.

The Times - June 3, 1999

PEARLINE ROBINSON JACKSON

by Callie White

A passionately committed resident of Argenta for about 20 years, Pearline Robinson Jackson was the kind of neighbor everyone likes.

And helping to rescue North Little Rock's oldest neighborhood became a driving force in her life. With five years on the Argenta Community Development Corporation's board of directors, she devoted herself to persuading people to buy houses in the struggling neighborhood and supporting them with food and encouraging words when they did.

Monty Richard, resource development coordinator with Argenta CDC, called her "a very, very significant person in helping rebuild her neighborhood."

Mrs. Jackson died July 26 after a long fight with colon cancer. She was 74.

Annie M. McCombs, her sister, recalled that she was "just a person who didn't want to talk and sit back and watch. She wanted to do something."

And she did do something, - almost every day she involved herself in the community and the church she loved, her friends said.

The youngest of three daughters and one brother raised in Earle, Mrs. Jackson grew up on a farm her father worked. Her mother taught first through eighth grade in a two-room school house to help support the children.

Her mother's dedication of education influenced Mrs. Jackson greatly: She graduated from Shorter College in the 1940s and promptly began working in the resource department of the Little Rock School District. But not for very long.

Children were her focus and she became a teacher's aide in the classroom, retiring last year after nearly 20 years at Martin Luther King Magnet Interdistrict Elementary School.

Her concern for children, however, didn't end when school was out. Usually she had two of three children over at her house after school for tutoring.

"She loved kids; it stemmed from my grandmother," said Albert Douglas, her son from her first marriage in 1940 to Albert Douglas, who passed away suddenly in 1950.

Two years later she married Henry Jackson, whom she met when she hired him to do some concrete work at her home. He died in 1975.

Mrs. Jackson had rented a house on Fifth Street in Argenta for 15 years before she bought it in 1995. Richard and Mrs. Jackson had never dreamed she could purchase her own property until, after meeting with Argenta CDC, she decided to use the organization's help to get a home loan.

"She was a pioneer of sorts," Richard said. "She moved into her home at a time when the historical district area was not stabilized."

But Mrs. Jackson pressed on, staying in her neighborhood because she was determined to be a part of the grassroots effort to make Argenta livable, and lovable as well.

Once Mrs. Jackson's house was hers, it became a model for the CDC. With its fresh paint and beautifully landscaped yard, it attracted new neighbors to Argenta, especially to that block of Fifth Street, which is now CDC's showcase block.

Fifth Street is now regarded as the most desirable address in Argenta, due in no small part to Mrs. Jackson['s well-tended house, Richard said.

And more than just having her home be the picture of smalltown neighborliness, she worked at creating a real neighborhood from the ground up.

Both from her position on the CDC board and as a community activist, Mrs. Jackson encouraged more than half a dozen families to move to Argenta and guided first-time home buyers through the same process she had gone through.

Concern for the neighborhood didn't stop there. She was always the first to run food over to the homes of her neighbors, whether they were new or ill, McCombs said. A skilled seamstress, she was known to make and fit clothes for her neighbors.

"She could sort of look at a person, and could tell if they could pay. And if they couldn't she'd go ahead and make the clothes for free," McCombs said.

Mrs. Jackson was a 30-year member of Lee Chapel AME Church, as well as a longtime Sunday School superintendent and missionary president.

"On Sundays she would pick up people who didn't have any transportation and take them to church," McCombs said. And when Mrs. Jackson fell ill she called on her son to take over her route.

In addition to her son and sister, she is survived by a granddaughter and grandson-in-law, Courtney Shae Thurman and Jeff Thurma of Enid, Okla.

The Times - August 17, 2000


JESS HELM

Inspiring Rollin' Razorbacks founder, 52, dies

By Eric Francis

Newly retired from the North Little Rock Planning Department, Jess Helm was looking forward to a vacation in Hawaii that his wife and niece had been planning for them all.

But shortly before they were due to leave, Mr. Helm, who had been paralyzed by polio as a youth and had a long history of kidney problems, found himself back in the hospital, unable to go. But instead of canceling the trip, he told his wife and niece to go without him and not to skip anything they might want to do while they were there.

"Don't come back regretting you didn't do something," his wife Diane said he instructed them.

That gesture of selflessness, said Mr. Helm's friends, was typical of his generous and caring personality.

As it turns out, just about the time his wife and niece returned, Mr. Helm developed pneumonia and his condition worsened dramatically during his hospital stay. He eventually asked his doctor to stop his kidney dialysis treatments, and he died last Thursday at age 52.

Born to Jesse "Jake" and Leona Helm in the small town of Clovis N.M., just eight miles from the Texas border, he contracted polio from the Salk vaccine in the seventh grade, despite 1000,000-to-one odds against that ever happening. From the age of 12 onward he spent his life in a wheelchair. After graduating from high school in New Mexico, he moved to Arkansas with his family.

Although he had aspired to be an architect, Mr. Helms was unable to gain admission to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville school of architecture; however, a dean there, impressed by Mr. Helm's artistic talent, encouraged him to pursue that avenue. He eventually did, enrolling at Southern Arkansas University in Camden, where he graduated with an associate's degree in commercial art.

Mr. Helm worked four years at the printing company, then joined a consulting firm where he worked on planning projects. In October of 1971, he married Diane O'Dell of Conway.

The two met in Hot Springs, Diane Helm said, and it wasn't quite love at first sight.

"He just didn't seem my type," she recalled. "But he had a real good sense of humor, and I guess that's what made us decide to start dating."

Over the years, it was his relentlessly positive attitude that made the greatest impression on her, she said.

"What helped me most through all of his problems is he endured them so well," his wife said.

His attitude about hismedical condition was so remarkable that he was often asked to talk to new kidney dialysis patients.

"He told them it was no big deal and tried to ease their anxieties," his wife said.

Mr. Helm joined the Pulaski County Planning Department in 1980, where he spent 10 years before joining the North Little Rock Planning Department, where he spent another decade. City Planning Director Robert Voyles, who served as a pallbearer at Mr. Helm's funeral last Saturday, said he admired the way Mr. Helm handled adversity.

"This affliction had come upon him, through nothing he had done," Voyles said.

But instead of being bitter, Mr. Helm accepted it and didn't let it deter him in anything he did.

"I think of him as an enlightened person, kind of a modern day Job," Voyles said. "I can't think of many people like him."

An avid illustrator, Mr. Helm created posters celebrating Arkansas Razorback victories, as well as pen and ink illustrations, some of which remain on Planning Department walls.

John Perrin Sr., the city's electrical inspector who also worked in the same office as Mr. Helm, called him "very knowledgable, a very good person...and an inspiration to all of us.

"When I was down, I'd go talk to Jess, just about generalities and he'd lift my spirits," Perrin said.

Mr. Helm would help found the Rollin' Razorbacks, the wheelchair basketball team, in his own carport in 1977. It was he who secured permission from University of Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles to use the Razorback name.

Mr. Helm played for the team until health issues forced him off the floor in 1983, but he then remained active as team president. The Rollin' Razorbacks went on to win five National Wheelchair Basketball Association championships and were the first wheelchair team inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

In a 1998 interview, head coach Harry Vines called Mr. Helm, "The heart and soul of the Rollin' Razorbacks."

In the team photo after the first NWBA championship in 1991, Mr. Helm can be seen, front and center, holding the trophy in his arms.

Mr. Helm's niece, Theresa Davis, came to live with her uncle and aunt at age 19 in 1987 after her mother died, and he became a wonderful, down-to-earth anchor in her life, she said.

"Nothing got him down," she said. "I never once saw him down or wanting pity. He didn't like people to feel sorry for him."

And wherever he went, he invariably found friends, she said.

"He never met a stranger," Davis said." Every time we would go out to a restaurant, there was always someone he would go up to or just stop and say 'hello' to."

Mr. Helm was preceded in death by his father. In addition to his wife and niece, Mr. Helm is survived by his mother, Leona Helm, of New Mexico; brothers Walt Helm of Alexander, and Don Helm of Kansas; and sister, Jeanie Weeks of New York.

Funeral services last Saturday were held at St. Theresa's Catholic Church in Little Rock with the Rev. John Connell officiating. Interment was at Pine Crest Memorial Park in Alexander.

The family requests that memorials be made to the National Kidney Foundation or Spinal Cord Foundation.

The Times - August 24, 2000


HAROLD LOY STANLEY

To find everything she could ever ask for, Delores Stanley had to lose everything.

She was barely out of high school when her family home in Watson, Ark., burned to the ground.

"I only had the clothes on my back," Stanley recalled.

She soon left Watson to live with her uncle in Little Rock, who took her to Stans Jewelers to replace a watch she had lost in the fire. There she met Harold Loy Stanley, who was behind the counter - and Delores Newlin was swept off her feet.

In spite of a 20-year age difference, Harold Stanley was likewise enchanted by her and within a few months arranged a date. A year later, the two were wed.

Harold Loy Stanley, known tohis friends as Stan, died Tuesday, Aug. 22 of liver cancer. He was 90.

"I think I fell in love with him before he fell in love with me," Delores Stanley said.

Born in Beebe, Harold Stanley was the youngest of six children, five brothers and a sister. His father, Jason Chester Stanley, a carriage maker, passed away suddenly when Harold was only 5, leaving wife Lela Garrod Stanley to care for their brood by herself.

It was a difficult life, one filled with poverty and struggle and a firm Methodist upbringing, Delores Stanley said. But Mr. Stanley was, if nothing else, a child who looked to make the best of tough situations, and found ways to have fun.

So one sweltering hot day, when he was still small, he and his buddies decided to sneak into the local Baptist church to swim in the baptismal pool.

"His mother would have skinned him alive if she'd every found out," Delores Stanley said. It was years after the two were married that he ever brought up that adventure, she added.

But Mr. Stanley dreamed of a better life, and followed his older brother to Little Rock, where he started his career in gemology and watchmaking.

"I guess when you're in poverty, you have dreams of doing something special," Delores Stanley said.

In Little Rock, Mr. Stanley studied under a master jeweler and watchmaker while working as an usher at the Arkansas Theater. His wife said he was too poor to go to college, but saw this trade as a way to make a decent living. He financed his training, she said, by fetching bootleg moonshine (during Prohibition) for his teacher from a place known as the Hinderlighter in downtown Little Rock.

"He didn't know he was breaking the law," Delores Stanley mused.

After his training, Mr. Stanley joined the Army during World War II and was stationed in Midland, Texas, where he learned to work on bomb sights. Although his family is not certain whether he made or defused ordnance, his work was a specialty that required a watchmaker's precision. He was honorably discharged when he fell ill.

His careful work in the military earned him a constant flow of customers in the 1950s from the Little Rock Air Force Base. Back then, before digital watches, accurate time-keeping could mean life or death for pilots.

In 1948, when his brother, who established Stanley Jewelers Gemologists in North Little Rock, closed the Little Rock store, where Harold Stanley had worked and met his future wife, he established his own store, Stans Jewelry & Tobacco, in Little Rock.

Honest and forever loyal to his customers, Mr. Stanley could tell any who brought in pawnshop watches with watchmaker marks that signified multiple repairs that they should get their money back.

And when customers came in with peices and no idea of their value, he informed them if they had treasure.

Yet when other jewelers turned away customers who wanted repairs to their old, worthless costume jewelry, he put the same care and effort into restoring them as he would have done had they been made of the finest diamonds and gold, family members say. He knew those pieces were gifts from loved ones, and their sentimental value was worth more than the gold that was his trade, they said.

"He would do anything to make people happy," Delores Stanley said. It was one of his qualities that she couldn't resist. But she did try.

Concerned about their age difference, and planning to move to Memphis with her uncle's family, Delores Stanley broke up with him once during their courtship. She resolved to forget about him and attended a Travelers baseball game with a young man who had box seats. But whom did she find in the next seats that night but Harold Stanley, who was also trying to get over her by going out with a friend.

"All he could think to say was, 'Are you alone?," Delores Stanley recalled.

The next night he asked her to marry him, and she couldn't refuse.

"I guess it was fate," She said.

About eight years after the Stanleys were married, she quit her job with New York Life Insurance to raise their only child, Sharon. When Mr. Stanley suffered a stroke in the early 50s, Delores managed the store, keeping baby Sharon in a playpen in the back.

And because of the hominess of Stans Jewelry & Tobacco, which made much of its business selling fine cigars and candy whose aromas permeated the store, it was a magnet for the workers in the First Union Bank Building.

"It was like Grand Central Station," Delores Stanley said. "It's like home to us, and we felt like everybody's mama and papa."

Even when Mr. Stanley retired at age 65, and even when he became sick with colon cancer, an eye melanoma and bladder cancer, all of which he licked, he would pass the time tinkering, adept at working on his car as he was with watches, she said.

He finally came back to work at age 70, not stopping until he became too ill this summer to keep working.

Besides his wife of 48 years, his daughter Sharon Louise Stanley, both of North Little Rock, Mr. Stanley is survived by numerous nieces and nephews.

Funeral services were held Friday, Aug. 25, at the Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Interment was at Beebe Cemetery.

The Times - August 31, 2000


CHARLES H. KENNEDY

Great doctor, friend to patients dies at 71